Abstract

A significant part of the Internet traffic today is generated by
peer-to-peer (P2P) applications used originally for file sharing, and
more recently for real-time communications and live media streaming.
Such applications discover a route to each other through an overlay
network with little knowledge of the underlying network topology. As
a result, they may choose peers based on information deduced from
empirical measurements, which can lead to suboptimal choices. This
document, a product of the P2P Research Group, presents a survey of
existing literature on discovering and using network topology
information for Application-Layer Traffic Optimization. This
document is not an Internet Standards Track specification; it is
published for informational purposes.